mogrovejo
05-18-2010, 04:28 PM
This interview with Lionel Hollins is probably one of the most entertaining interview to NBA coaches I've ever read.
http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2010/may/13/geoff-calkins-lionel-hollins-talks-mike-conley-oj-/?partner=RSS
It touches plenty of interesting topics and his candor is quite refreshing. Anyway, I've noticed Popovich is often criticized in this forum for having an excessive and misguided attraction for small-ball lineups. It doesn't surprise me, because Boston fans have bitched for years about their coaches liking small-ball to much. And pretty much every fanbase rants endlessly about their coaches liking small-ball too much.
One of the exceptions is the Memphis fanbase. Due to some puzzling personnel decisions, they have a handful of true bigs in their roster: Randolph, Gasol, Haddadi and top-2 pick Thabeet. Darrell Arthur would have been their 3rd big if not for injuries and even though I think he should be a perimeter player, more precisely a specialist in wing defense, he's the size and game of a PF. The only thing close to small-ball they played was DeMarre Carroll seeing 200 minutes at the 4.
So, it was interesting to read this part of the interview where Hollins mention their needs for the next season. He even cites the Spurs.
GC: Do you have any minutes at the 5?
LH: See, that’s the other thing that hurts Hasheem. We play in the West. As soon as the game starts, everybody goes small. We’ve tried at different times and stayed with it and it’s been effective for us, but you can’t count on it every night. You play Portland, they take everybody out of the game and they play with Juwan Howard at 5 and Brandon Roy at 4, and they’ve got Andre Miller and (Martell) Webster and back then they had (Steve) Blake. And they’re playing all these guys in the game. You can’t play the way you want. The San Antonio Spurs found that up with the Suns these last two weeks. You can try all you want. They kept trying and those guys just kept torching them. Whoever they put (Tim) Duncan on, that was on the perimeter, he scored.
GC: You can say all you want about “dictating the game” but when they’re dictating threes in your face it’s no fun?
LH: It’s not fun at all. You play New Orleans, they play David West at 5. Houston. All these teams. So it really restricts the amount of time you can play Hasheem. Even when Marc is playing, to keep Marc and Zach on the court at the same time is difficult. Marc made tremendous improvements in being able to go out and play some of the 4s. He even guarded Nowitzki, which allowed us to play him and Zach together. But if you can’t guard that guy, you can’t play those guys together.
This relates to an old conundrum in basketball coach: to match up or not to match up? There's a school of thought that firmly believes you "dictacte" the terms of the game, "you do what you do", and don't mind about the opponent personnel and style of play - if there's mismatches you try to take advantage of those in your favour and you keep doing what you believe it's correct.
Another one is more flexible with line-ups, substitutions, game management and playing style and proposes finding solutions for the problems the opponent creates. The negative part is that you may lose some identity as a team and you can end up finding solutions for problems that may not exist (I guess that's what most fans criticizing their coach for going small will say they criticise them for but I think that's baloney).
IMO, and even though at lower levels there's no foolproof formula, the strategy of matching up is the only good one at the NBA level - Hollins words indicate he agrees. There's just too many players/rosters with enough quality/versatility to create mismatches you can't solve by not making counter-moves at a lineup level. In particular when it comes to small-ball, sometimes you just need speed out there that you bigger guys can't offer. Sometimes you really need to space the floor with shooters and there aren't a lot of 7 footers who can shoot. And the "let's wait and keep doing what we're doing and everything will be fine in the end" approach doesn't work all the time not only because the mismatches arent' always symmetric but also because sometimes the execution just isn't there and games end after 48 minutes. You can't just say "yeah, they're going on a 30-0 run but it's just the start of the 4th and we just have to keep pounding the ball inside, deal with their fronting in a smarter way, stay calm making the entry pass, oh and rebounds will start falling our way". Obviously, if you have those great equalizers like, say, Odom, who can defend perimeter 4s, even in transition, while allowing you to stay big and are still able to stretch the floor, that's great, but players of that type aren't easily available every Summer.
As an external observer, my opinion is that the Spurs priority this off-season in terms of personnel should be acquiring some guy who can allow them to match-up with small-ball line-ups better than they did in the last few seasons. To me that was also the Spurs' roster biggest flaw this season. Bonner is a nice stretch 4, but he lacks the defensive intensity+rebounding+reliability to play an important role in the playoff rotation of a contender. This guy should be good enough to be a 3rd big and play 30mpg when needed (a player who can stay on the floor even when his scoring contribution isn't there), not good enough to be a good 5th big. Every season the league is becoming quicker - the game relies more on speed, fastness and spacing and less on size. And I think this trend will persist in the forseeable future, meaning that even in the near future a small-ball lineup solution will be at least as necessary as the typical "a legit 7 footer" in any respectable roster. Even more. Can Splitter be that guy? I'm not sure. He may be, he's very quick footed for his size, but can he stick with true small-ball 4s, guys like Granger or G Wallace? Doubt it. Even if you believe so, Splitter isn't someone who's able to stretch the floor - he's a subpar/streaky shooter from the 12ft area. Maybe the Spurs can go for a "by commission" approach, slotting Jefferson to play the 4 in some cases, Splitter in others. I think that's a flawed solution.
So, in my opinion, the Spurs need to add more versatility to their big man rotation besides Splitter - that's the only way Popovich will stop being criticized for going small too often.
http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2010/may/13/geoff-calkins-lionel-hollins-talks-mike-conley-oj-/?partner=RSS
It touches plenty of interesting topics and his candor is quite refreshing. Anyway, I've noticed Popovich is often criticized in this forum for having an excessive and misguided attraction for small-ball lineups. It doesn't surprise me, because Boston fans have bitched for years about their coaches liking small-ball to much. And pretty much every fanbase rants endlessly about their coaches liking small-ball too much.
One of the exceptions is the Memphis fanbase. Due to some puzzling personnel decisions, they have a handful of true bigs in their roster: Randolph, Gasol, Haddadi and top-2 pick Thabeet. Darrell Arthur would have been their 3rd big if not for injuries and even though I think he should be a perimeter player, more precisely a specialist in wing defense, he's the size and game of a PF. The only thing close to small-ball they played was DeMarre Carroll seeing 200 minutes at the 4.
So, it was interesting to read this part of the interview where Hollins mention their needs for the next season. He even cites the Spurs.
GC: Do you have any minutes at the 5?
LH: See, that’s the other thing that hurts Hasheem. We play in the West. As soon as the game starts, everybody goes small. We’ve tried at different times and stayed with it and it’s been effective for us, but you can’t count on it every night. You play Portland, they take everybody out of the game and they play with Juwan Howard at 5 and Brandon Roy at 4, and they’ve got Andre Miller and (Martell) Webster and back then they had (Steve) Blake. And they’re playing all these guys in the game. You can’t play the way you want. The San Antonio Spurs found that up with the Suns these last two weeks. You can try all you want. They kept trying and those guys just kept torching them. Whoever they put (Tim) Duncan on, that was on the perimeter, he scored.
GC: You can say all you want about “dictating the game” but when they’re dictating threes in your face it’s no fun?
LH: It’s not fun at all. You play New Orleans, they play David West at 5. Houston. All these teams. So it really restricts the amount of time you can play Hasheem. Even when Marc is playing, to keep Marc and Zach on the court at the same time is difficult. Marc made tremendous improvements in being able to go out and play some of the 4s. He even guarded Nowitzki, which allowed us to play him and Zach together. But if you can’t guard that guy, you can’t play those guys together.
This relates to an old conundrum in basketball coach: to match up or not to match up? There's a school of thought that firmly believes you "dictacte" the terms of the game, "you do what you do", and don't mind about the opponent personnel and style of play - if there's mismatches you try to take advantage of those in your favour and you keep doing what you believe it's correct.
Another one is more flexible with line-ups, substitutions, game management and playing style and proposes finding solutions for the problems the opponent creates. The negative part is that you may lose some identity as a team and you can end up finding solutions for problems that may not exist (I guess that's what most fans criticizing their coach for going small will say they criticise them for but I think that's baloney).
IMO, and even though at lower levels there's no foolproof formula, the strategy of matching up is the only good one at the NBA level - Hollins words indicate he agrees. There's just too many players/rosters with enough quality/versatility to create mismatches you can't solve by not making counter-moves at a lineup level. In particular when it comes to small-ball, sometimes you just need speed out there that you bigger guys can't offer. Sometimes you really need to space the floor with shooters and there aren't a lot of 7 footers who can shoot. And the "let's wait and keep doing what we're doing and everything will be fine in the end" approach doesn't work all the time not only because the mismatches arent' always symmetric but also because sometimes the execution just isn't there and games end after 48 minutes. You can't just say "yeah, they're going on a 30-0 run but it's just the start of the 4th and we just have to keep pounding the ball inside, deal with their fronting in a smarter way, stay calm making the entry pass, oh and rebounds will start falling our way". Obviously, if you have those great equalizers like, say, Odom, who can defend perimeter 4s, even in transition, while allowing you to stay big and are still able to stretch the floor, that's great, but players of that type aren't easily available every Summer.
As an external observer, my opinion is that the Spurs priority this off-season in terms of personnel should be acquiring some guy who can allow them to match-up with small-ball line-ups better than they did in the last few seasons. To me that was also the Spurs' roster biggest flaw this season. Bonner is a nice stretch 4, but he lacks the defensive intensity+rebounding+reliability to play an important role in the playoff rotation of a contender. This guy should be good enough to be a 3rd big and play 30mpg when needed (a player who can stay on the floor even when his scoring contribution isn't there), not good enough to be a good 5th big. Every season the league is becoming quicker - the game relies more on speed, fastness and spacing and less on size. And I think this trend will persist in the forseeable future, meaning that even in the near future a small-ball lineup solution will be at least as necessary as the typical "a legit 7 footer" in any respectable roster. Even more. Can Splitter be that guy? I'm not sure. He may be, he's very quick footed for his size, but can he stick with true small-ball 4s, guys like Granger or G Wallace? Doubt it. Even if you believe so, Splitter isn't someone who's able to stretch the floor - he's a subpar/streaky shooter from the 12ft area. Maybe the Spurs can go for a "by commission" approach, slotting Jefferson to play the 4 in some cases, Splitter in others. I think that's a flawed solution.
So, in my opinion, the Spurs need to add more versatility to their big man rotation besides Splitter - that's the only way Popovich will stop being criticized for going small too often.